I Pledge Allegiance To My Swag Vol 1., Or: R U Still Down?

Back in the year 1996, many were rewinding Satva Leung’s switch frontside flip and gearing up for several years of cargo pant ownership, while Saturday Night Live alum Al Franken penned a book of political satire that also included a hearty endorsement of the seemingly all-powerful Lexis Nexis search tool, and an anecdote about growing up during the time of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The point of that parable was that as a Jewish family, Franken’s folks felt as though they had an obligation to support the struggle of other groups of people struggling against marginalization.

Now it is 50 years later, machines do our bidding and the eras of disco, alternative music and cargo pants all have come and gone. The magazine King Shit publishes this week an interview with a woman in the process of no longer being a man who also skates. She is from North Carolina, knows her way around a switch backside tailslide and seems generally guarded. Which probably makes sense, since one of the mostly endearing things about this little realm is a sort of terminal immaturity that lends itself to hopping fences, sassing authorities and buying merchandise with all types of skulls and fire on it. Alongside a healthy appreciation for bathroom humor comes a mentality where a rumor that pro X might be gay, for instance, can rise up and be chattered over for something like a decade.

If you look to the Slap board, that often harsh portal into some of the views that get kicked around your typical skatepark, everybody’s pretty supportive of this woman, while lodging various quips and whatnot. It is worth pondering from the perspective of considering skating an outlier subculture. Coming up outside California around the time Thrasher ran the tombstone on its cover, skateboarding was for sure an outsider’s pastime when it came to parents, peers and assorted authorities and so occasionally, when being shown the door of some loading dock or other, that you had some taste of the challenges faced by other sorts of folks regarded as lower-value or below the norm by the powers that be.

(Here’s a placeholder paragraph where can be shoveled all the necessary and true disclaimers about this pursuit being rooted in a kids’ hobby that we all make a conscious choice to take up, and how there are and will be far worse trials in the world than getting kicked out of spots, termed a “loser” and/or dressed down by the police or security guards.)

In the run-up to this interview being published I wondered about whether or not people would have supported this girl’s deal as much in 1996 as the folks on the Slap board seem to be this week, how much of this is indicative of society being more open of mind in 2011 and so on. One of the concerns rambled on about in the past at this blog-site is what becomes of the social fabric of this little realm, with now at tens of millions of kids owning boards, sanctioned skateparks supplanting street spots, lessons and coaches and sports agents and TV shows, yadda yadda. And at what point a sub-culture can still claim outsider status if more kids are kickflipping than playing shortstop, and whether skateboarding still sets out a welcome mat for misfits, or if they’ll still even want to come in? It seems like in the past there was a time when such types gravitated toward skateboarding but these days you wonder if it’s skateboarding that needs more folks like this girl.

The Beak Is Back, Maybe

Can’t be stopped

As you can imagine, even in the freshly minted year of our Lord 2010, the Muska is never far from our minds around here. Whether it was his days pioneering the cargo pant as the Shorty’s team captain, the clear sunglasses-and-headscarf combo of Circa’s heyday or his resurrection as a white-denimed Hollywood nightcrawler, Chad Muska’s legacy looms large. So large in fact that I was gobsmacked no less than twice yesterday during my usual You-Toob clip perusal by the way Muska fulfilled the dream with one of his token moves, the backside noseslide.

I’ve been hard-pressed to keep up with the various “You/U/Eu” video contests and other excitements that seem to be constantly churning over at the Berrics, but was prompted to click this one because it had an odd name that I incorrectly thought belonged to a single person, and also because it came from Mexico, home to some bros that do a lot of body varial tricks. The Muska moment arrives at 2:33 with a healthy noseslide through some sizable kinks and taken back to regular which is always a good look with this move.

Elsewhere on the planet, globetrotting Yankees fan Kenny Reed stretches his backside 5-0s to worldly proportions and revisits a few obscure spots en route to a (spoiler alert) truly massive noseslide down something like 50 steps. The sheer length is one thing but what makes this noseslide really classic is how low the ledge is and the never-say-die way that Reed skids it out to the bitter end. Kind of comical but it’s interesting to see a resurgence of these more basic tricks these days. People like Davids Gravette and Gonzales are promoting 5050s again when there’s a gnarly handrail involved, although for years it seemed like that trick had been discarded as too basic* to even consider. If noseslides creep back into the rotation, perhaps there will one day be no need to twist boardslides into feeble grinds.

*disregarding Anthony Pappalardo, in which case that seems like the whole point